case study analyses

The following case studies of transformative urbanism are analyzed in order to gain insight into their transformative nature and learn lessons for future practice. All case studies of urbanism, by their very nature, are flawed yet yield extremely valuable insights when analyzed critically. The analytical frameworks for the case studies are derived from the philosophy of Pragmatism.

Beyond Objects: City as Flux

What really exists is not things made but things in the making. Once made, they are dead, and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them. But put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and, the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession, you are no longer troubled with the question of which of them is absolutely true. Reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis; it mounts in living its own undivided life—it budges and bourgeons, changes and creates.

Beyond Intentions: Consequences of Design

Such reasonings and all reasonings turn upon the idea that if one exerts certain kinds of volition, one will undergo in return certain compulsory perceptions. Now this sort of consideration, namely, that certain lines of conduct will entail certain kinds of inevitable experiences is what is called a practical consideration. Hence is justified the maxim, belief in which constitutes [P]ragmatism; namely: In order to ascertain the meaning of an intellectual conception one should consider what practical consequences might conceivably result by necessity from the truth of that conception; and the sum of these consequences will constitute the entire meaning of the conception.

Beyond Practice: Urbanism as Creative Political Act

Moral choice becomes always a matter of compromise between competing goods rather than a choice between absolutely right and wrong . . . We stake our sense of who we are on the outcome of such choices . . . [For Pragmatists], moral struggle is continuous with the struggle for existence, and no sharp break divides the unjust from the imprudent, the evil from the inexpedient. What matters for [P]ragmatists is devising ways of diminishing human suffering and increasing human equality, increasing the ability of all human children to start life with an equal chance of happiness.